Events

Theatre Production: “Where Can I Find Someone Like You, Ali?”

Gulbenkian Theatre, Beirut campus

The Department of Communication Arts will be hosting “Where Can I Find Someone Like You, Ali?,” written and performed by Raeda Taha and directed by faculty member Dr. Lina Abyad.

Ali Taha. Hijacker of Sabena Flight Sabena Flight 571 in 1972.
Ali is a father, a husband and a brother. He departed and his womenfolk were left to continue his life for him and to continue theirs through him.
The Martyr’s Wife. The Martyr’s Daughter. The Martyr’s Sister… Heroic roles that were assigned to these women without them requesting it. A beautiful woman widowed at the age of twenty-seven, four young daughters, the eldest only 7 years old… Suheila, Ali Taha’s sister, who went looking for Kissinger with a single request: to retrieve the body of her brother the Fidāʾī so she could bury him after two long years in the morgue. 
Raeda Taha, the author of the play, and Ali’s eldest daughter, opens the family’s intimate archives to shatter the halo of The Martyr and its stereotype, stripping it of the myths of heroism. In the process, and in painful candor, she faces the reality of being an orphan, of loss, and of the absence of a father who can never be replaced, not even by Yasser Arafat himself.

Thus does Raeda go on stage to hold Ali accountable? She strips him and herself bare, speaking in her own voice, that of her mother, and of her aunt. She turns the women into real-life heroines, albeit unknowns, and turns Ali Taha the Martyr-Hero… into a father, a mere father. 

Entrance is free of charge.

Seat reservation via email only at weinali2015@gmail.com, confirmation will be via a returning email.